3/24/2010

The Pacific: Everything Wrong with Hollywood

Boring is Original Sin for Show Biz. The Pacific on HBO is a snore fest for anyone who has ever watched the History Channel for ten seconds. Watching two hours of a badly produced months long battle for Guadalcanal makes one realize just how fucking good Hurt Locker creator Kathryn Bigelow really is. Doing a battle scene is not just shooting guns at darkness, having people bleed, and destroying property. Story is what counts and there ain't no there there. Even worse than the lack of a cohesive narrative is the really bad writing that shows our Army as well supplied clowns, our Marines as heart warming guys feeling bad about killing Japs who after all were family guys who carried baby pix in their field packs just doing a job while our clean shaved kids shoot them and say real stuff like "fuck" from time to time in order let us think that somehow this is all real. But true to Hollywood PC rules not a single word about the revolting atrocities the Japanese performed on captured GIs as well as the then well known treatment of civilians in Singapore (70,000 marched into the bay while the sensitive Japanese troops shot the floating heads off), the slaughter of civilians in Manila, and the horrifying Rape of Nanking (300,000 slaughtered by rape and bayonet which was shown in theater newsreels during the late 30s). All our guys were continually made aware of the consequences of capture and all were scared shitless and filled with hate. But it's the dialogue that is the death knell. Hello, liberals of Hollywood; girls are repeatedly called broads in this piece of shit when the word was unknown back then. Girls were "dames" in the 40s as anyone who has seen South Pacific would know (song: "There Is Nothing Like A Dame. Nothing In The World. There Is Nothing You Can Name That Is Anything Like A Dame."), babes, mamas, dolls, frails, snuggle puppies yes, but broad is strictly Sinatra of the 50s. Men were cats, Aces, Joes; when the guys got killed they were put in Chicago Overcoats and so on. Totally false dialogue. The guys in this phony are all clean shaven while in the jungle; in reality they were pinned down day and night and not only rarely shaved but they had to defecate in their underwear which they wore for weeks at a time. In other words a totally ersatz show from start to finish. The most glaring actual plot error is ignoring the actual turning point of the war which was The Battle of Midway, the Naval engagement that took place months before. Midway was the event that made Guadalcanal possible. Only a kid would think this series was worth watching but had the kid ever read "The Naked and the Dead" by Norman Mailer which was set right in the middle of the suffocating South Pacific jungle, he'd know just how shitty the Hollywood Drafter Dodger version of war really is.

3 comments:

jHans Walther said...

Your color scheme has somehow changed so that the black type disappears on a black background. Just an fyi.

Howard said...

Yeah, I think I fixed it. I had some kind of virus in my PC and got rid of it.

Anonymous said...

As of Tues Mar 30 10pm EDT it's still messed up on my browser (Internet Explorer).